Research

The Gift of Dyslexia by Ron Davis

Ron Davis is an American Dyslexic.

He believes that through a specific method of training the dyslexic can be cured of the disabling effects of their dyslexia, whilst still retaining the unique gifts they have as a dyslexic.

We'll try here to give a brief and simplified breakdown of his theories.

1) There are 2 kinds of thought.

Verbal thought (in words)
Non-verbal thought (in pictures)

We all think in a mixture of verbal and non-verbal thought.

VERBAL THOUGHT	NON VERBAL THOUGHT

Dyslexics specialise in non-verbal thought and can be described as "picture thinkers".

Rather than thinking in words you will think in pictures in your mind's eye. These pictures are not just visual, but more like 3-dimensional, multi-sensory movies.

Verbal thinking happens at about the same speed as speech.

Non-verbal thinking (picture thinking) is much faster, so fast that you're not even aware when you do it.

2) There are 2 kinds of words.

Words that have no mental picture (and, the, of, a )
Words that describe real things and are easy to visualise (dog, tree, walk)

Words that you have no mental picture of will often cause the dyslexic great difficulty.

reading woman

Words that describe things are not difficult for you to have a mental picture of.

Ron Davis has drawn up a list of these difficult words. He calls these words

"trigger words".

This is what he says is happening to you -

As you read a sentence you are building up a picture in your mind's eye about what you are reading.

Each time you come across one of these "trigger words" it is causing you to become disorientated because you have no visual picture for the word.

You are constantly being tripped up by these small, often quite simple words in the sentence.

The sentence ends up becoming a series of unrelated pictures with blank space in-between.

film strip

If you concentrate hard you can often push past these confusing blanks in the sentence, but you'll feel more confused the further you go on.

Eventually you'll reach a threshold of confusion and become disorientated.

Reading then becomes difficult or impossible.

3. Symbol mastery

The dyslexic needs to create their own mental picture for each of the trigger words.

In the 'Davis Symbol Mastery Procedure' the person creates the meaning of the word as a 3-dimensional picture.

They do this by

Understanding a dictionary definition of the word.

Making a clay model of the word.

Making clay letters of the word in lower-case.

Say the word and its definition out loud.

4. Orientation mastery.

Davis sees disorientation as the root of the problem for dyslexics.

He has designed a procedure through which you can learn how to intentionally turn your disorientation on and off.

It involves training you to find your orientation point (somewhere above and behind your head).

Once this is found, you start to practise turning your sense of disorientation on and off by moving to and from your orientation point.

Through training, you should then be able to switch off dyslexic disorientation whenever it occurs and as a result improve your reading and writing skills.

Instructions on how to carry out orientation mastery are contained in the book
'The Gift of Dyslexia'.

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